The point of all this isn’t to repeat the line that the Old always throw at the Young. The point is to realize that all of us are running the marathon from whatever starting point we’re given, and all of those starting points suck. The ones you didn’t start from might seem good, but that’s because you can’t really see them. This cuts both ways and in all directions. You know your time. The rest is guesswork.

Every generation, every single one, has over-corrected for the horrors they saw in their formative years. GI’s reached for the chintzy “How Much Is That Doggie In the Window” 50’s culture like a dying man in the desert reaching for water. Silents and Boomers ran from it like zeks departing the Gulag, empowering every Hellish human impulse with Good Intentions. Gen-X gave their souls to Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex just to be anchored in something that was real.9 Millenials tried to insist that everyone reorder the way we think about everything, so that we could have nice things again. All of it failed, all of it sucked, all of it passed the buck downstream.

You kids today will not be any different. Whatever you do, however you do it, Generation Beta or Gamma or Whatever will look at you sometime in the 2040’s or 50’s and say “What did you do?” and call you the Worst. And you will tell them that they weren’t there and they don’t understand.